Agenda item

The report sets out the Key Performance Indictors, measured against the legal requirements and the Fund’s own targets for the administration of the Local Government Pension Scheme for the three-month period up to the end of May 2024.

The Pension Manager introduced the report and explained that there had been good processes with bulk calculations, and officers had taken steps to try to be able to report them with their KPI’s. The Pension Manager informed the Board that the team had made some improvements to their systems and processes which had offered encouragement, and the team would look to begin another set of bulk calculations next week.

The Pension Manager stated that the pensions team had received the information from nearly all the employers for their end of year processes, only two employers were yet to respond.

The Pension Manager explained that a contract had been signed with Heywood regarding the member self-service system and the technical team were now able to fully test the system. The Pension Manager informed the Board that the PLSA have their engagement week in September but there was another in November, so the team would be able to do further testing later in the year.

The Pension Manager explained that new guidance had been published earlier in the year which had increased the KPI requirements. The pension team had an upgrade to the Insights reporting system which was heavily focused on the new KPI requirements. The Pension Manager stated that the team’s workflow had been streamlined, however they now needed to unpick this and include a lot more levels to meet the reporting requirements; these changes would take time to implement and wouldn’t be in place until next year as the team needed time to adjust.

In response to a question from a member, officers informed the Board that:

• The Council did not manage school’s payroll so they were free to choose whoever they wished.
• The team would do most of the testing themselves with Hotmail and Gmail accounts
• The Pension Manager had filled in the survey, they looked at 6 workstreams and pensions was not one of the areas, they would then look to implement some of these improvements to the workstreams into other areas which may benefit pensions.
• There was room for AI to assist with the work of the pensions team.
• There had been discussion with the pension team’s technical person, they were still uploading from end of year schedules. The team were confident that they would meet the deadline, the annual benefits statement had not changed much from the previous year.
• Officers were confident that the Insight reporting will improve the quality of their work.  When a new process was introduced, there would need to be some training and process notes drafted before staff could become accustomed to it, however once the new process was set out the new reporting would be seamless.
• It was required for the annual report, but they would need to run monthly in order to form part of the annual report. They would be using different tasks to set up new workloads.
• There was not a firm timetable for when schools should be contacted, officers acknowledged that engaging with schools during the summer months was not ideal. The pension team anticipated that October would prove to be more productive.
• The employer function required a governance process, and Governance teams would usually help with the process.
• The legal requirement is to notify members of their benefits within three months and the team had not met this requirement for various reasons such as issues with data or the workload of officers.
• Officers usually worked with internal comms regarding annual benefits statements. They worked closely with colleagues in other authorities. External employers were a bit trickier to deal with.

RESOLVED: To note the Key Performance Indicators and the performance against these indicators set out in Appendix A to this report.